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HLS, HKS Professors Launch New Tool To Assess Local Public Opinion

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Professors from Harvard and George Washington University launched a data visualization tool early last month to help legislators better assess local opinions on policies.

TrueViews — a website built in collaboration between Harvard Law School and the Bloomberg Center for Cities — displays a color-coded United States map containing detailed statistics of political perspectives on a variety of topics, including criminal justice, abortion and gun control.

To create the site, researchers relied on data from 18 national surveys conducted between 2009 through 2023. The site displays public viewpoints on 32 policy questions by zip code, city, county, district, and state.

Harvard Law School professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos said he hopes the tool will help bridge the gap between constituents’ desires and elected officials’ policy priorities.

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“There’s a distressing pattern today where representation and policy is often quite distorted relative to what people want, and there’s some evidence that some of that distortion is just because policymakers don’t know what people think and want,” Stephanopoulos said.

Stephanopoulos added that, according to the data, the country is less polarized than the public often assumes.

“It was a pleasant surprise to see the variety and the complexity of public opinion, and to see that it doesn’t always boil down to the standard red-blue, or north-south, or city-country cleavages,” he said.

The project began in April, after Stephanopoulos and HLS professor Ruth M. Greenwood — who directs Harvard’s Election Law Clinic and is married to Stephanopoulos — came across work by George Washington University professor Christopher S. Warshaw on public opinion at the local level. The pair decided they wanted to work with Warshaw to visualize his findings.

“We all see public polling at the national level — honestly a little too much — but getting that information at the school board, the zip code, the local town level, was something that only became possible with advances in political science techniques,” Greenwood said.

Through the following months, the group — which also included HKS professor Justin de Benedictis-Kessner — got to work, compiling the survey data using the computer program R. Next, they recruited GreenInfo — a non-profit assisting in data visualizations — to assemble the final product.

Despite the level of detail the site provides, de Benedictis-Kessner cautioned against using TrueViews to show local policy impacts on constituent opinion. Because the tool estimates local data from national demographic and geographic information, some conclusive power is lost.

“You can’t say, ‘Oh, TrueViews shows me the impact of gun violence in Orlando, Florida on people’s opinions about gun control in Orlando, Florida,’” he said.

Due to the unexpected level of legislator and academic interest in TrueViews, the creators are working to secure more funding for follow-up studies and analysis.

“We would love to get more information on local government-specific issues, zoning and housing and policing and funding and so on, so that we can then have more information on a local level,” Greenwood said.

Nithin K. Venkatraman, a graduate student at HLS and HKS who helped conduct research for the project, said that TrueViews will fill a gap in polling for local representatives.

“You would be surprised by how desperately people really want to know what their constituents think,” he said. “There’s a lot of good faith on the side of people who are in office, and often the resources just aren’t there.”

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